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ddt writes "Raise your glasses of champagne in a toast at midnight. The time(2) system call turns 40 tonight, and is now officially 'over the hill.' It's been dutifully keeping track of time for clueful operating systems since January 1, 1970." And speaking of time, if you don't have a *nix system handy, or just want a second opinion, an anonymous reader points out this handy way to check just how far it is after local midnight in Unix time. Updated 10:03 GMT by timothy: The Unix-time-in-a-browser link has been replaced by a Rick Astley video; you have been warned.

The 32-bit time_t is signed (I'm assuming so you can expression times less than the epoch, but that's just a guess)

Indeed.Some binary blobs do require the use of a signed integer for calculating differences in time which is much of the apparent hesitancy to convert to a 32 bit unsigned integer time system. More here. [wikipedia.org]